The ceiling above her bed hovered steadily in the semi-light. She rustled amidst the thin layer of covers as she twisted hard to the left to catch sight of the red digits on the clock radio. The other portable cassette job was still droning away in its barely audible volume as it had been adjusted the night before. She was feeling uneasy. Her right arm was aching terribly just below the shoulder on the outside. She could recall that she had turned hard to that side compacting it down some time earlier before the last dream. What had happened in that particular fabrication of slumber, like so many other dramas, was now more feeling than tell able tale. Far past an ability to be properly recited. She knew for a fact it involved a neighbor farther down the hall of some longstanding near acquaintance that she barely knew. But now of course everything had become twisted around and she had developed an inexplicable dependency for their continued company. But that connection had suddenly dried up reverting to a bout of stormy weather’s approach threatening to instantly wash away whatever commonality existed between them. She had to clear her shit out of the apartment before a fight started. But like all things human there was just too much to take into hand with too much of it ending up having to be abandoned. A vague feeling of coming to full consciousness left her with a building feeling of a physical unease. There was not yet that same old expected need to pad off quickly to the toilet, though this incessant sensation of general uneasiness was beginning to assert itself. The coming of this longest to date early appearance of the Summer Solstice plagued her with the fact of an early dawn spreading above her. The symphony of building types of discomforts now demonstrably engaging her insides. Something that one might have expected as a matter of course if they had foolishly over indulged the evening before? But she had not. Her half-sister? A message flashed for an instant through her distracted nervous system. There was so much to talk about that given that situation she did not want to contemplate this early. It was all too early to have to be waking up! And she did not want to be bothered by the waking world for at least another couple of hours. She shifted back over to the other side, and then, unsatisfied, tossed her body the opposite way. The dull ache instantly reminded her of the shoulder. It was clear that she was to be embroiled in a less than subtle cacophony of unwanted sensations. Each in their own way conspiring together to plague her. All of them now focusing to center in her middle as if conducted from this orchestra pit to cooperate in producing an overarching sense of an ever building crescendo of apprehension. Suddenly relenting, she nervously grabbed away the covers to find the edge of the bed and quickly rise up to her feet. The cold of the overhead air conditioner striking her bare legs propelling her through to the hall and over into the unit’s small lounge. She would have gladly settled there to light up a cigarette, if she still smoked! The empty coffee pot waiting in her dark kitchen came to mind after another couple of mindless diversions that had been left over from the night before.
It was obvious that her half-sister was dying. And probably dead by now! Something these troubled insides suggested. The dimness on the horizon outside accented by the onset of occasionally drifting clouds with their knife edges rapidly assuming a pinkish glow. The usual mental agenda when awakening focusing on a need to make coffee, or alternately, find something else in its place was helping to assist the building of a hollow cathedral vault inside her middle. Some toast or that last un-split English muffin coming to mind. Its contents laying at the end of a small dark corridor alone by itself at the end of a long plastic enclosed cardboard foyer in the fridge. The thought of it residing there just waiting made her feel a little sicker. It drove her back the the bedroom on the pretext that her overall aches needed sleep as a cure. Somehow more appropriate to the task of overall relief from the gnawing within than food. At least the last of the razor sharp impressions that the night had inspired had finally retreated back into her nagging belly She climbed back under the tepid covers, quickly pulling them up as far over her as they would go. Too late at this stage to ignore the dawn with its fullness now all about the bedroom room spreading its illumination. The small nightcap absurdly inefficient to the task of covering the top of her face unable to stem its tide. That chronic ache in her right shoulder still nagging, The hollow drum of her abdomen echoing its own beat in consort. A quick abrupt exit towards the kitchen suggesting engagement in some more immediately useful activity needed to divert her current attentions away from this ever building general misery.
The white pitcher of cold filtered water needed to service the coffee urn with its innate quantity being perfectly Sympatico with the capacity required for making a single pot of coffee being in hand. A paper filter and three spoonful’s measured out by habit loaded within before the top of the maker was snapped down and its switch thrown. It was a minute or so before the rattle of its breathing reached the sofa where she had now retreated to hold up upon. Was her sister dead? She wondered if this inner wholly unexpected maelstrom was directly a result of a psychic telephone connection? One that had from time before rung her up in similar situations from the past. Bad news being delivered in a similar fashion. Though like any normal average female, her sensations could be said to be so much more attenuated by default than any of her genetic counterparts. This was not anything that she would need to have to prove. That other unexpected phone call that she received in the afternoon, two days earlier, had been unsettling enough. The reigning backdrop of all these ceaseless network news reports proclaiming constant crisis and disaster in general over the course of a year and a half of worldwide malaise was now beginning to hit home. Strokes and heart attacks and cancers that had barely been noted over the last year and a half, now suddenly frighteningly on the rise? Her half-sister’s husband prefacing his explanation over the phone with the fact of their recent distance from each other as of late due to conflicting politics. It gave her a sense of guilt. The bulk of the conversation quickly laying out a scenario of her sister’s unexpected collapse subsequently leading to an attending physician’s diagnosis. Blood clotting in her carotid artery combined with subsequent profuse bleeding on the brain. Dire conditions that required a number of emergency operations that in turn led to the removal of a section of her skull as a last ditch effort. All that seemed left to do was to await a final call from her sister’s husband that would announce what seemed, hope against stated hope, the most probably inevitable.
The dilapidated couch’s foam felt two decades too old and unsubstantial below her bare legs. The coffee pot was now done making its simulated death rattles. But she didn’t feel like getting up. Her half-sister had long ago abandoned the city and state it served as the center for another in the deep southern region of the country. So long ago in fact that she had almost become forgotten her presence beyond the obligatory holiday card sent at Christmas. Now her sister came to mind in a last guise serving as an unrepentant political cheerleader on behalf of the crackpots screeching right wing conspiracy all over the media. She had just recently heard her boasting aloud her edict over the last call that she was going to hold a celebration for her sixtieth birthday on her property, inviting only those that had been properly vaxed. The corresponding mental picture brought to mind by that strident pronouncement being of some gated affair with dutiful guards hired to monitors certificate’s and demanding sleeves rolled up to bare the display needle scars before entry. It was this obsessive arrogance that had made her sister untenable listen to since the beginning of the year. Then there was her own inner tendency to mentally call out the notion of an ‘I told you so!’ in response to this sudden illness. A hard thing to weigh in on against the obvious fallibility of so many conventional types that had so trustingly marched off promptly to line up and get ‘the jab‘. The media and government officials consistently cheerleading. Egging on the throng of suckers all the way to their doom. It made her brutally angry to think of how all these elitist bastards would soon slink off into the shadows the minute things would go bad. The media then finding others convenient to scapegoat so as to continue their flawed theories when people would begin to start dying off en masse. The new symptoms of a kind that could no longer be properly ascribed to others in their much publicized ongoing epidemic narrative. A remnant of her last remaining kin seemed off on a one way journey back to utter oblivion, like so many others that she had once known. Too many that she had formerly heavily counted upon.
The apartment was now dead silent. Little beyond the irritable sound of rushing air stirred by her air conditioning. These occasional sea breezes spouting cold air daring her not to return to her bedroom and put something warm on. She walked over to her cell phone on the shelf. There was nothing to be done! The display on her phone remained clear of any new notifications. The email and text sections only sullied with a couple unsolicited notices which were quickly dispatched. Her seething emotions now silently subsiding in the wake of full consciousness, their distress could be put aside for the moment. An empty feeling of inconvenient hunger needing to be filled providing an perfect excuse to rise to her feet and attend to those more of her usual habitual practices each morning had come to expect. The most urgent coming to her notice as she bent forward fully out of her muse to realize that she still needed that first trip of the day to the bathroom. As she rose up she turned to look out of the picture window finding the morning quietly illuminating all from afar. The sun now well over the horizon. The swish of slowly passing traffic out of sight from below. Her needs satisfied, she stood before her kitchen’s counter mindlessly exhuming the last muffin from under the body bag wrapper enclosing its emptied oblong box. A clean serrated knife at the ready in her hand, she split the pale white body into two separate halves. Butter and jelly then being mechanically applied after which she instinctively brought the jelly encumbered knife to her lips to lick off the sweet dark crimson residue before tossing the knife towards the bottom of the empty sink. The blur of so many passing thoughts flying quickly past her mind’s eye as she stood mentally withdrawn from them. The blatant contradiction of another normal day unconcerned with human sorrows standing mute before her. There would be plenty of time to hear the final verdict. Perhaps later in the day? She might as well face the morning as yet another to be lived fully and glean what small enjoyment possible until then.